Work management is essentially about identifying and managing workflows to streamline crucial business processes to become more efficient in achieving objectives and meeting clients’ needs.
Yet, how can we execute work management?
Although many managers already understood the importance of implementing work management, many have neglected to do so. This is because they don’t know where to start.
If you are one of them, you’ve come to the right place, and below we’ll discuss how to implement work management in just six simple steps.
Let’s begin with step 1.
Step 1: Identifying Problems of Current Work Process
Why do you need to improve your work or business process in the first place?
As the old saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” It’s essential not to transform the work just for the sake of change. You’ll need to have a valid reason before implementing work management to improve the existing work, and thus you should start by identifying the problems of the current process.
You should evaluate:
- Objectives: whether the work objectives are clear, measurable, and attainable. Assess whether your team is adequately supported in achieving these objectives.
- Communications: check communication policies and whether your team members and stakeholders are already communicating and collaborating as effectively as possible.
- Evaluation: how do you measure success for each step of the work process
Aim to find bottlenecks and potential areas to improve upon. You can use various methods like conducting employee surveys, in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, etc.
A critical approach to ensuring accurate identification of work problems is to visualize your workflow in a workflow diagram, which you can easily do with a work management platform like Aproove. Work management software would also help in accomplishing the next steps in this work management process.
Step 2: Prioritization of Work Processes
Based on your organizational objective(s), you should prioritize which business processes, projects, and/or tasks should be optimized immediately and which ones can be improved later on.
This step is important because the actual implementation of work management can be costly, both in the financial sense and time.
There are several approaches you can use in prioritizing work and processes:
- Prioritizing the processes that do not directly impact the customer before moving on to the core, high-impact processes. This approach is preferred if you want to reduce risk.
- Prioritizing processes with the highest value by assessing the benefits of improving each process at the moment and whether improving the process will deliver the desired benefit of work management.
- Customer-driven, prioritizing processes that cause customer complaints and pain points.
- Prioritizing processes with obvious flaws, for example, when a process produces much waste.
You can use other approaches, but it’s essential to identify your corporate strategy and ensure your prioritization aligns well with this strategy.
Step 3: Designing Work Improvement
The next step is to design the work processes’ improvement based on the analysis you’ve performed in the previous steps. You’d want to involve your team members and stakeholders involved in the business process in designing the work improvement. You can achieve this by forming a focus group consisting of these stakeholders.
This will significantly help in getting better insights into what an effective process looks like. You can define the process’s accountability, transparency, feedback, and collaborations.
Again, a centralized work management platform like Aproove can significantly help in accomplishing this step.
Step 4: Selecting Supporting Technology
Work management without any supporting technology is virtually impossible to execute nowadays with the size and complexity of business processes in today’s organizations.
When choosing a work management technology solution, it’s important to consider three key elements:
- The software solution should not dictate what the work management process should do, but your work management strategy should dictate what the software solution should do. So, choose a software solution based on your predetermined requirements.
- You’d want a software solution that is flexible, scalable, and customizable according to your growing needs as an organization. Your organization will change along the way, and this technology should be able to accommodate these changes.
- The software solution should be as easy to use as possible. This will significantly save time and costs associated with training employees to use the solution.
Step 5: Implementing The Changes
Embrace the fact that your initial efforts for improvements may not be perfect. You can experiment with the actual implementation of work management and make adjustments along the way.
Aim to collect as much data as possible in as little time as possible, and don’t hesitate to make changes along the way. Refer back to your initial objectives of implementing work management and optimizations.
Step 6: Evaluation
In this step, you can validate whether the implementation of work management has achieved the desired objective(s) or whether you’ll need to make more improvements.
It’s also essential to involve your stakeholders and team members in the evaluation process: share with the team the improvements you’ve successfully achieved together and problems you’ve faced along the way.
You can use the same approaches as in step 1: surveys, interviews, workshops, and others to gather more data in this step.
Based on this evaluation, you can decide whether to improve the process further or move on to the next process.
Conclusion
By following the six simple steps we’ve shared above, you can now start implementing work management and optimization in your organization right away.
With the increasing complexities of implementing work management as your organization grows, proper work management software can be a great solution where project managers, team members, stakeholders, and clients can easily visualize every step of the project.
